Tag: police state

UK Leads Global Push For Notification Data Requests

Back in 2023, we reported on how US agencies have used push notification metadata on smartphones for surveillance, pressuring tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over user information. Prompted by Senator Ron Wyden’s inquiry, Apple revealed it had been legally barred from disclosing this practice, which raises serious concerns about civil liberties and government overreach.

Cut to today and government demands for user information tied to Apple’s push notification system continued into the first half of 2024, with the United Kingdom submitting 141 requests, despite the nation’s relatively small size, and the United States following with 129.

Germany also obtained data during this period. Singapore, despite making inquiries, received none. These figures come from Apple’s most recent transparency report, shedding light on global government interest in a lesser-known surveillance vector.

Even some privacy apps can be undermined by surveillance at the push notification level. Many apps have to rely on Apple or Google to deliver notifications; services that can expose critical metadata such as which app sent the notification, when it was sent, and how often.

This metadata can be used by governments to infer user activity, and social connections, and even de-anonymize users. It bypasses app-level encryption entirely, exploiting a layer outside the user’s or developer’s control.

Apple’s report outlines what’s at stake with these requests. When someone enables notifications for an app, the system generates a “push token” that links the device and app to a specific Apple account.

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Welcome to the Palantir World Order

How does a company with CIA ties and two steering committee members of the secretive Bilderberg Group as founders end up in the White House?

This question should be on the minds of every free-thinking person regardless of political affiliation or lack thereof. The answer to this question cuts to the heart of understanding the future direction of the American experiment, and the impact it will have on the rest of the world.

Starting in 2019 I began warning that we were witnessing the creation of a Technocratic State, with Big Tech CEOs amassing exorbitant wealth and unfathomable data about the world. This collection of financial wealth and data has allowed these Technocrats to gain power equivalent to many nations, and beyond that of smaller nations. Palantir is a perfect example of the merging of corporate and state power.

Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, long before they were made Steering Committee members of the secretive Bilderberg Group. Karp and Thiel launched Palantir with seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. The CIA aimed to use Palantir to relaunch the controversial post-9/11 program known as Total Information Awareness. TIA would be shuttered after public outcry and concerns around surveillance. However, after Thiel and Karp began meeting with intelligence officials they helped Palantir to do privately what the government could not get permission from the American people to do publicly.

Over the last 120 days of the 2nd Trump administration it has become clear that Palantir is on the way to becoming the U.S. government’s new favorite Military Industrial Complex contractor of choice. A quick search reveals numerous headlines detailing the recent rapid rise of Palantir’s stock.

This should come as no surprise given the abundant contracts and projects Palantir is reportedly developing with the U.S. government. Here’s a brief look at the ways in which Palantir is becoming more deeply connected to the MIC.

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GOP Congressional Committee Proposes Ban On Hemp Products With THC That Advocates Say Would Have ‘Devastating’ Impact On Industry

A GOP-led House committee has unveiled a spending bill that contains provisions that hemp stakeholders say would devastate the industry, prohibiting most consumable cannabinoid products that were federally legalized during the first Trump administration.

The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies published the text of the legislation covering fiscal year 2026 just one day ahead of a scheduled Thursday markup.

The 138-page bill covers a wide range of issues, but for the hemp industry, there’s a section of particular concern that would redefine hemp under federal statute in a way that would prohibit cannabis products containing any “quantifiable” amount of THC or “any other cannabinoids that have similar effects (or are marketed to have similar effects) on humans or animals” as THC.

That would effectively eliminate the most commonly marketed hemp products within the industry, as even non-intoxicating CBD items that are sold across the country typically contain trace amounts of THC. Under current law, those products are allowed if they contain no more than 0.3 percent THC by dry weight.

But the proposed policy being taken up by the subcommittee helmed by anti-marijuana Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) would drastically change that. It would instead maintain the legal status of “industrial hemp” under a revised definition that allows for the cultivation and sale of hemp grown for fiber, whole grain, oil, cake, nut, hull, microgreens or “other edible hemp leaf products intended for human consumption.”

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Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”Ayn Rand

Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency. President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

This puts us one more step down the road to China’s dystopian system of social credit scores and Big Brother surveillance.

The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways—with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata—cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

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Britain Imposes Islamic Blasphemy Law as Man is Convicted of Burning a Quran

Britain’s transformation into an Islamic state is almost complete.

The case in question relates to a man who has been convicted of a “religiously aggravated public order offence” after he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London.

The Spectator magazine reports:

This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate.

The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.

Hamit Coskun burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in February, before being attacked by a man named Moussa Kadri who has since pleaded guilty to the assault. Mr Coskun was initially charged under the Crime and Disorder Act with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam harassment, alarm or distress’.

On sentencing Coskun, the left-wing activist Judge John McGarva said Coskun’s conduct was “provocative and taunting” and accused him of harboring a “deep-seated hatred of Islam and its followers.”

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EU Tech Laws Erect Digital Iron Curtain

Over the past decades, Europe has created little of real relevance in terms of technological platforms, social networks, operating systems, or search engines.

In contrast, it has built an extensive regulatory apparatus designed to limit and punish those who have actually innovated.

Rather than producing its own alternatives to American tech giants, the EU has chosen to suffocate existing ones through regulations such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The DSA aims to control the content and internal functioning of digital platforms, requiring the rapid removal of content deemed “inappropriate” in what amounts to a modern form of censorship, as well as the disclosure of how algorithms work and restrictions on targeted advertising. The DMA, in turn, seeks to curtail the power of so-called gatekeepers by forcing companies like Apple, Google, or Meta to open their systems to competitors, avoid self-preferencing, and separate data flows between products.

These two regulations could potentially have a greater impact on U.S. tech companies than any domestic legislation, as they are rules made in Brussels but applied to American companies in an extraterritorial manner. And they go far beyond fines: they force structural changes to the design of systems and functionalities, something that no sovereign state should be imposing on foreign private enterprise.

In April 2025, Meta was fined €200 million under the Digital Markets Act for allegedly imposing a “consent or pay” model on European users of Facebook and Instagram, without offering a real alternative. Beyond the fine, it was forced to separate data flows between platforms, thereby compromising the personalized advertising system that sustains its profitability. This was a blatant interference in its business model.

That same month, Apple was fined €500 million for preventing platforms like Spotify from informing users about alternative payment methods outside the App Store. The company was required to remove these restrictions, opening iOS to external app stores and competing payment systems. Once again, this was an unwelcome intrusion and a direct attack on the exclusivity-based model of the Apple ecosystem.

Other companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and even X are also under scrutiny, with the latter particularly affected by DSA rules, having been the target of a formal investigation in 2023 for alleged noncompliance in content moderation.

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Ohio podcaster files to reverse conviction for felony intimidation

A true crime podcaster convicted of felony intimidation for attacking the reputations of Norwalk, Ohio, city employees in a social media post is asking an Erie County judge to reverse that decision, the law firm that filed the motion announced on Tuesday.

The Pattakos Law Firm argues that Ashli Ford’s Facebook post is free speech protected by the First Amendment and is not a threat that should warrant her conviction. The firm also claims the conviction has had a “chilling effect” that silences the “non-threatening expression” made by Ford.

According to court documents, the September 2023 Facebook post made allegations against multiple city officials in Norwalk: Mayor David Light, the city’s law director and prosecutor Stuart O’Hara, the city’s safety and service director Michael White and former Norwalk police chief David Smith.

“Ford stated she had the four men ‘on [their] knees,’ and she would ‘slowly crumble the reputation of every person who stands in the way of justice,’ according to court documents. “She went on to claim she would ‘escort [them] to [their] demise in a manner more akin to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King Jr.'”

The Akron-area law firm claims “the Facebook post for which Ford was convicted consists entirely of classic political speech and does not contain any content that could be reasonably construed as a ‘true threat’ so as to overcome the First Amendment’s robust protections for such speech.”

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NJ to Consider Bill that Would Mandate Monitoring and Publishing Data of Homeschoolers

The New Jersey Senate is set to consider a bill on Thursday that would require families who homeschool their children to register with their local governments and the governments to publish their data.

Senate Bill 1796 (SB 1796), sponsored by New Jersey state Sen. Angela McKnight (D) would require a “parent or guardian to annually notify” their local school district, in written form, of their intention to homeschool their children.

“The letter shall include the name, date of birth, and grade level of the child, and the name of the person who will provide instruction to the child,” the latest version of the bill’s text reads.

Under SB 1796, the school district will be required to “annually compile and make available for public inspection on its website information concerning the number of children who reside in the district who are being home-schooled” and what grades they are in. It does not include any provisions to protect the privacy of the individual children or families in question and does not provide a legal definition for the term “homeschool,” which opponents have observed does not formally exist in New Jersey law.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which opposes the bill, alerted its members on Tuesday that on Thursday, June 5, a legislative hearing will be held regarding SB 1796. The bill appears on the docket for a New Jersey Senate Education Committee hearing scheduled for that day.

The HSLDA opposed the bill on the grounds that it would create “pointless and burdensome red tape”:

Senate Bill 1796 would require every homeschool family in New Jersey to file a letter with their public school superintendent expressing their intent to homeschool their children. The birth date and grade level of each child would be required as well, and the bill provides no privacy protection.

In a post on X, HSLDA encouraged homeschool families in the state to “call or email” their state senator and to ask them to oppose SB 1796.

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Is This Stunning Censorship A Glimpse Into Our Own Future?

The BBC has reported on smartphones smuggled out of North Korea that are setup to spy on citizens and prevent them from using language that is not authorised by the Communist state.

Instead of simply not allowing North Korean people to have such devices, the regime there has decided to manufacture and distribute phones as a tool for further controlling the population amid fears that freedom, in the form of South Korean culture, is encroaching.

The BBC reporter demonstrates how the phone edits words and phrases that are are not acceptable to the North Korean government, and replaces them with language they have sanctioned.

In one example, the reporter types in a South Korean slang word for “boyfriend” and the phone changes it to “comrade.”

A second example shows the reporter typing in ‘South Korea’ and the phone automatically changing it to “Puppet State.”

The phone also covertly takes a screenshot every five minutes, stores the images in a secret folder which the user cannot access, but North Korean authorities can scour through should they wish to do so.

The report also notes that the North Korean Communists have deployed “youth crackdown squads” to patrol the streets listening out for people using South Korean slang or styles of language.

Wild stuff.

“Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people,” Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Stimson Center, and an expert in North Korean technology and information, told the BBC.

Williams further noted that North Korea is now “starting to gain the upper hand” in the information war.

Some online pointed out that its ironic that the state funded BBC filed this report, given that people in the UK are being imprisoned over social media posts.

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Texas Hemp Advocates Deliver 100,000+ Petitions To Governor’s Office, Urging Him To Veto THC Ban Bill

Texas hemp advocates and stakeholders are rallying in opposition to a bill the legislature passed to outlaw all consumable hemp-derived cannabinoid products containing any detectable THC—delivering more than 100,000 petition signatures asking Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to veto the measure.

“Senate Bill 3 was designed to destroy a vibrant and legitimate industry,” Cynthia Cabrera, president of Texas Hemp Business Council, which represents the state’s roughly $8 billion hemp industry, said in a press release. “The bill now awaits review by Governor Abbott. We respectfully urge him to consider the facts, listen to our appeal and make the logical decision to veto SB 3.”

At a press conference on Monday, Cabrera said she wanted to “address the misinformation, misdirection and maligning of this industry” by the bill sponsor, Sen. Charles Perry (D), and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who serves as presiding officer of the Senate and strongly advocated for the legislation.

“SB 3 violates the very principles Texas prides itself on: small government, individual freedom and free enterprise,” she said. “Governor Abbott, we ask that you keep your promise to small businesses, to women entrepreneurs and to every Texan who values freedom.”

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